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Three fairly major stories dominated the news this past week: Trump
walking away from his summit with North Korea's Kim Jong Un without
even making a serious proposal or showing any interest in long-range
peace; Michael Cohen's congressional testimony, where he made a case
that his own crimes were directed by Trump; and Trump's "free-form"
speech at CPAC's annual convention. We'll take these in order, then
conclude with the leftovers, including some stories that are actually
bigger and more ominous than the headline grabbers: a dangerous border
skirmish between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, US escalation
against Venezuela, the impending indictment of Israeli PM Netanyahu,
the usual gamut of Washington scandals, and some hopeful legislation
that Democrats are introducing (and campaigning on).

Fred Kaplan:
Love can't buy a nuclear deal: "Trump and Kim failed to reach a
breakthrough in Hanoi. For now, that may be for the best." It bothers
me a lot when otherwise astute observers say things like this. War is
so horrific no one should ever argue that walking back from the peace
table is a good thing. What this really shows is that Kaplan, like so
many American "experts," doesn't see costs and risks to perpetuating
the status quo, especially the cruel sanctions regime. In the lead up
to the summit, I didn't bother citing the many pessimistic forecasts,
like Kaplan's own
Trump's bargaining position with Kim Jong-un is unbelievably weak.
Kaplan is half right about that, in that there is virtually nothing
the US can do to force North Korea to capitulate. On the other hand,
the US has one great asymmetric advantage, in that we know that Kim's
"nuclear threat" is mere bluff, while US sanctions cause real pain
with little or no cost or risk. I could expand on this much more, but
right now don't have the time or stomach. But I will leave you with
two points: one is that Trump is exceptionally capable of negotiating
a realistic deal with Kim because he identifies with strong dictators
and has no inclination to judge them morally (also because he doesn't
have any compelling graft not to deal, as he has with Iran, Yemen, and
Venezuela); the other is that this summit demonstrates a common thread
in Trump's foreign policy, which is his utter contempt and callousness
in all his dealings with the world.

When President Richard M. Nixon opened relations with China, he did not
demand that Mao Zedong abandon the bomb. Mao would simply have refused,
and the historic moment would have been lost. Trump faces the same
fundamental choice. If he does not accept the reality that we now live
with a nuclear-armed North Korea, then we are doomed to the collapse of
negotiations, and perhaps even a return to the terror of 2017, punctuated
with Trump's taunts of "Rocket Man" and boasts about whose button is
bigger.

David Dayen:
It might be time for a "War Dogs" sequel: Report on a Defense
contractor TransDigm Group, which a recent report revealed "'earned
excess profit' on nearly every parts contract it made with the Defense
Department."

Maggie Haberman: et al.:
Trump ordered officials to give Jared Kushner a security clearance:
Not much of a story, but much cited this week. Kushner eventually got
his clearance, and nobody seems to know exactly why it took so long --
in his position, it should have been automatic (not that he ever should
have gotten the job). So the interest now seems to be catching Trump in
another bald-faced lie (video link included).

"The year 2011 proved to be the moment of phase change, when digital
anger passed over into political action."

"Elites currently seem to be more concerned with re-establishing
their distance from the public than with reforming the system or
restoring their own authority. They equate legitimacy with clinging
to the top of the pyramid."

"When you abolish history, you lose your memory and it's like you've
had a stroke. That condition can lead you to do crazy things."

"If we select the elites, we can un-select them. When it comes to
politics, we can support politicians who fit into the digital age and
are willing to compress the pyramid and dwell closer to the public."

O.K., this was world-class lack of self-awareness: It doesn't get much
better than being lectured on self-reliance by an heiress whose business
strategy involves trading on her father's name. But let's go beyond the
personal here. We know a lot about upward mobility in different countries,
and the facts are not what Republicans want to hear. . . .

Look, Ms. Trump is surely right in asserting that most of us want
a country in which there is the potential for upward mobility. But the
things we need to do to ensure that we are that kind of country -- the
policies that are associated with high levels of upward mobility around
the world -- are exactly the things Republicans denounce as socialism.

Elie Mystal:
Running the Democratic primary through 'Trump Country' is the road to
defeat: "Yes, we're looking at you, Bernie Sanders." Basically says
don't waste your breath on the deplorables, or anyone else who lives
in parts where they're statistically significant -- in effect, arguing
that demography is destiny, and going even further than Clinton in
admitting that Democrats have nothing to offer people who aren't part
of their focus groups. Dismisses Sanders as "just the most prominent
white man in the race right now." Adds that: "Both Trump and Sanders
campaigns could be read as promising to put a white man 'back on top,'
where he always thinks he belongs." As if any differences between the
two pale in comparison to checking a couple of boxes on census forms.

Perhaps the answer lies in a new genre of journalism that forgoes the
pedestrian task of reporting the news in favor of explaining it through
the lens of academic research. Ensconced at Vox, FiveThirtyEight,
dedicated pages of the Washington Post and the New York
Times, and across Twitter, the explainers place great stock
in the authority of scholarship -- and in journalists who know how
to wield the authority of scholars. This genre first arose under the
roseate glow of Obama, reflecting the White House's warm embrace of
science and smarts. Now, in the age of Trump, it's less a happy
affirmation of wonks and geeks than an anxious cry of the Resistance.
Being smart, honoring research, favoring truth: These are the emblems
of the world Trump wants to destroy and that the explainers wish to
preserve. . . .

Short-term interests and partisan concerns still drive reporting
and commentary. But where the day's news once would have been narrated
as a series of events, the Historovox brings together those events in
a pseudo-academic frame that treats them as symptoms of deeper patterns
and long-term developments. Unconstrained by the protocols of academe
or journalism, but drawing on the authority of the first for the sake
of the second, the Historovox skims histories of the New Deal or rifles
through abstracts of meta-analysis found in JSTOR to push whatever the
latest line happens to be.

It's not hard to think of suspect examples -- indeed, most of the
efforts to sketch Trump into the long histories of fascism or populism
miss more than they discover, much like the efforts to psychoanalyze
Trump as a sociopath -- but everyone brings some framework to their
observations, and it's usually better to have one that's tested and
coherent, rather than just falling for whatever PR slant most tickles
your fancy. I, for one, have found Vox exceptionally useful since Trump
became president. They do a relatively good job of summarizing news and
putting it into a context that is historical and scientific, and their
political slant isn't unpalatable (not that I don't find bones to pick).
On the other hand, I've found The Nation (which should be closer
to my politics) to be nearly useless (except for Tom Engelhardt's
remarkable TomDispatch, and whatever Mike Konczal contributes).

American Jewish groups have rightly condemned the new merger. But almost
all have refused to name or condemn the author of this atrocity,
Netanyahu. . . . In case anyone needs any further proof of Netanyahu's
fascist proclivities, look no further than Europe, where he's cultivated
not just the worst of the far-right parties, but outright anti-Semites
like Hungary's Viktor Orban and Poland's Law and Justice Party. These
are parties which unabashedly worship a national past in which fascism
and Jew-hating were rampant. Even worse, the modern successors have
developed a bad case of historical amnesia about these proclivities.

John Sipher:
Putin's one weapon: The 'intelligence state': "Russia's leader has
restored the role its intelligence agencies had in the Soviet era --
keep citizens in check and destabilize foreign adversaries." As noted,
the role of the secret police dates back to the Tsars. It's always been
justified by the presumed weakness of the nation and state, something
it tends to perpetuate.

Matt Taibbi:
This battle of billionaires was inevitable: "A surprise decision over
a Pentagon contract seems like the latest volley in a war between President
Trump and Jeff Bezos." Billionaires will always be jealous of one another,
but the main interest here is an open-ended contract to turn management of
the DOD's cloud computing over to a private contractor, under rules that
curiously exclude all competitors other than Amazon.